BOE proposes goals of upcoming school year; local anti-hate and anti-bullying group voices opinion on playground swastikas

What can only be called a growing hostility between board of education trustees and community residents regarding everything from critical race theory to masking in schools has begun to bubble up in countless auditoriums with the approach of the upcoming academic year. Northport-East Northport has been no exception.

Yesterday evening’s board of education meeting, while contentious at times, commenced with a cathartic moment of silence in honor of all the men and women who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. Both Superintendent of Schools Robert Banzer and the board’s president, Dr. Larry Licopoli, reminded all those in attendance of the 9/11 Remembrance Vigil organized by NHS social studies teacher and former Navy corpsman Darryl St. George. The event, scheduled for 7pm today, September 10, will allow community members to “remember and offer our solemn respects for all those we lost” and “strive to live honorable lives in their memory.”

The BOE meeting fell on the first day of school for first through 12th-grade students in the Northport-East Northport district. Mr. Banzer expressed his pleasure with the beginning of this academic year, one rooted, he said, in an attempted sense of normalcy. “There was a buzz in the air, there was excitement,” he said. “It was fantastic.”

The board of education, with the genesis of the 2021-2022 school year, then presented specific goals, motivations, and ideals for the upcoming nine months.

“One mission, one plan, one Northport-East Northport school district… this is what we want to focus on,” explained Dr. Licopoli, as a list of one-word ideals flashed on the slide presentation behind the seven masked trustees. Such ideals included responsibility, openness, equity, governance, and community, among others. These specific ideals, the board explained, were agreed upon during the BOE’s two summer retreats, the first taking place in early July, the second in late August.

When Trustee David Badanes calmly pushed back against the ideals as abstractions that deviated from the “meat and potatoes” of concrete action, Trustees Allison Noonan and Victoria Buscareno felt the words grounded their work and served as good points of entry. “This is our starting point,” Trustee Buscareno said.

With these various ideals acting as jumping-off points, the board laid out five concurrent goals for the 2021-2022 academic year. The first focused on the measurement of student progress within the Northport-East Northport school district. “Develop a plan for progress monitoring,” as the BOE’s language put it; the goal hopes to zoom in on the efficacy of certain educational programs and to discern if said programs function as intended (to instill in each student a “life-long learner”). As well, the proposed goal hopes to translate the various metrics of student progress into layman’s terms, so, as was explained, “we can all understand it.”

The second goal concerned transparency within educational reformations, seeking to produce “a consumer/taxpayer-friendly written and public presentation” of aligned educational plans (alignment refers to educational reforms intended to bring a greater efficiency and coherence to various educational policies and systems), as well as the budget development process. As the BOE stated, “throughout the years we’ve heard many people comment that perhaps the budget process could be made better, and that’s the goal here.”

The third goal of the BOE – to “develop a multi-year financial plan” – sought to bring enhanced forethought and insight to financial allocation throughout multiple, ongoing academic years to “make sure we are putting our resources in the right spots.”

The fourth goal revolved around the ideal of equity. The proposed goal wished to “align equity with policy… to foster a sense of belonging” regardless of “religion, national origin, economic and social level, sexual orientation, gender, age, or physical capabilities.” As Mr. Banzer put it, the step is absolutely crucial to the success of a student’s academic and emotional life, with the proposed goal seeking to reaffirm “the dignity and humanity in all people.”

The fifth and final goal – to “improve on internal and external communications” – focused on the BOE’s transfer of information, with specific attention paid to social media disinformation. The proposal seeks to focus on “how we communicate to our community, people with kids in school, people without; how we tackle social media with misinformation that’s not accurate. What we can do to improve that, so we all have the same facts and the same information.”

With the proposed goals for the 2021-2022 school year clearly laid out, the board voted unanimously in favor of its adoption.

The public comment section was then ushered in, with participants speaking on a range of topics, from mask mandates and critical race theory to a recent incident at Ocean Avenue Elementary School, where swastikas were discovered on the school’s playground equipment.

The first to speak was Northport resident Molly Feeney Wood, a representative and founding member of Northport’s Not In Our Town (NIOT) organization. As described by the organization itself, NIOT Northport is “a movement to stop hate, racism and bullying, and build safe, inclusive communities for all.” The original Not In Our Town effort was launched in 1995 with the release of a PBS film documenting the small-town, anti-hate actions of residents in Billings, Montana, after a series of hate crimes took place in their neighborhood. After the release of the film, the organization grew, inspiring “hundreds of communities in the United States and around the world to take action against hate.”

Northport’s NIOT organization was founded in early July of 2020 after Dickinson Avenue Elementary was found to be defaced with swastikas and racial slurs spray-painted on the building’s roof. As the organization stated, after this incident, “We wondered: where is the follow-up correspondence to the families of Dickinson Avenue and other schools in the district, comforting us and providing us with materials for education and action?... As Northport residents and parents of children in this district, we decided that we could not sit around waiting anymore.”

Molly invoked a similar sentiment at the September 9 board meeting, asking for BOE participation and calling on an end to complicitness after swastikas were again found on school property – this time etched into an Ocean Avenue Elementary slide, discovered by a district parent the weekend before school began.

In a letter sent to Northport-East Northport district officials immediately after the incident, the eight founding members of NIOT Northport stated that “there is clearly hate and bigotry in our community. We must ask: what has this district done in the year since the Dickinson incident, other than just paint over the symbols and words of hate? Where is the outrage, the action? We must ask you, again: please take a stand with us against this hatred.”

Appealing to the BOE’s ideal of equity, Molly stated that the symbol of the swastika “is such an overt act of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semetism. But most incidents of hate are not overt.”

When she spoke, Molly detailed numerous events the NIOT group has organized and is organizing around town, such as an author-of-color book drive and a local gathering in Northport Village Park, all with the goal of driving out hate and welcoming inclusivity to the community at large. “In order for [students] to be upright citizens, part of that includes an education around equity and diversity,” she said.

At the end of Molly’s commentary, board member David Badanes asked for specific events and programs that the Northport NIOT organization could submit for consideration.

Ocean Avenue parent Jeanine Herman applauded the board for reaching out, specifically with the 2021-2002 goal of equity as presented at the meeting, and called for empathy and inclusivity in the community – and in the schools.

She described the way her daughter, who is being raised Jewish, often feels left out when most school celebrations are focused on Christmas rituals, whether it’s a Christmas song, or a Santa hat, that don’t include other perspectives.

“It’s these little things, a quiet way that creates an ‘us and you,’ and the kids are picking up on this,” she said. “Each of these quiet moments, in aggregate, they do add up to be something. You can’t do one and not the other and not expect there to be something as a result.”

In response to a previous speaker who said her “joie de vivre” was affected by having to wear a mask, Jeanine said: “That resonates with her; that’s not my experience but I have to honor that. My joy of living is highly affected when my children’s playground has a swastika etched on it. That really affects my joy of living.”

Video of the full BOE meeting will be shared here once made available by the district.